Trifles

Social commentary and satire are standbys of the murder mystery genre, and Trifles is no exception. The play serves as an indictment of the patriarchal manner, by which men underestimate and dismiss women—often, to the detriment of their own purported expertise. That “expertise” in this play, is that of crime detection, and police and legal work. Throughout the play, the County Attorney (George Henderson) and Sheriff (Henry Peters) bluster in and out of the farmhouse, thoroughly convinced that their work is important and that they are the experts who will get to the bottom of the murder. They self-importantly stomp around while taking every opportunity to remind Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale how perfectly ridiculous and useless they find them.

However, it is the two women who display the insight and intelligence needed to solve the crime, and they, too, uncover the crucial piece of evidence that ties together the entire affair. This dramatic irony is the crux of the play. Through it, Glaspell mounts her indictment of a patriarchal society that habitually dismisses, erases, and undervalues women, while simultaneously highlighting the intimate specifics of how the violence of patriarchy is experienced in the most mundane ways by the women who must toil beneath it—with occasionally spectacular results.

Glaspell achieves this macro and micro-level critique by depicting the subjection of her female characters to very familiar (read: standard) iterations of male ego, within a singular context. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters each have their own personalities and motivations: Mrs. Hale feels guilty about her failure to come to Mrs. Wright’s aid, and her relative outspokenness about the injustice of men, while Mrs. Peters displays less rebellious tentativeness as the wife of the Sheriff. Nevertheless, both women can immediately empathize with Mrs. Wright’s suffering, and it is—surprisingly—Mrs. Peters who spontaneously recounts the story of her kitten killed by a boy in a perfect analog to Mrs. Wright’s experience. This spontaneously recounted anecdote displays the acute, shared experience and its attendant sense of solidarity shared by all the women in the play. Against a backdrop of an immediately familiar and universal iteration of the blustering male ego, these intimate details provide Glaspell’s critique with its multidimensional character.

Glaspell employs a steady stream of dramatic irony within the play’s concise action in order to indict the sexist carelessness of the men, which ends up being their own downfall. For instance, if the two men weren’t so busy making fun of the women for worrying over whether Mrs. Wright was going to quilt or knot the unfinished blanket, they might have realized that the piece of evidence they sought was underneath their noses among the quilting accoutrement—or “ladies things”—they summarily dismiss as inconsequential trifles. If George wasn’t so busy jabbing at the women and wondering whether Mrs. Wright was going to quilt or knot her blanket, he might be able to catch the sly double entendre Mrs. Hale speaks at the end of the play when she says she and Mrs. Peters have landed on knotting—which is a play on the way that the rope was knotted around Mr. Wright’s neck. To be clear, this final bit of dramatic irony does not function because the two men do not know that Mrs. Wright is the murderer, but because the answer to their question about the murder is in plain sight within the conversation of the women they are so eager to dismiss as trifling.  

The men's certainty about Mrs. Wright’s guilt, however, is also an interesting aspect of the play. No one—including the audience—doubts Mrs. Wright’s guilt. However, the male characters’ misogyny produces a peculiar catch-22: While they do not doubt that Mrs. Wright is the murderer, they also do not take seriously her, nor the strength and intelligence of women, which handicaps their investigation. While on the one hand they are convinced that Mrs. Wright is the murderer, they also do not see her quilting objects—nor any domestic object used by women—as anything that could carry real gravity or consequence. Their downfall is their myopia to the suffering, experience, fury, and strength of women. Their derisive dismissal of all women's conversations and tools as trifles, in tandem with a conviction of Mrs. Wright’s guilt that conveniently excises all consideration of her suffering in her marriage, function to doubly blind them and prevent them from taking a serious look at Mrs. Wright’s things. Indeed, this myopia also proved to be Mr. Wright’s downfall, as his wife finally had enough of the cruelty and suffering he inflicted on her, and decided to put an end to it once and for all. The failure of the men to see the complexity and strength of the women, which allows them to continue their oppression in blissful ignorance, also prevents them from considering the unique skills and motives of the women forced to contend with misogynistic violence. 

Through the play’s careful pacing and highly purposeful characterizations, Glaspell provides a slice-of-life portrait of the sisterhood of solidarity that arises among women having a singular experience of patriarchal oppression. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters have an immediate affinity for each other through their shared experience of being wives. Moreover, Mrs. Hale shares an even closer affinity with Mrs. Wright’s experience, as they are neighbors. Ultimately, the more cautious Mrs. Peters is won over to Mrs. Wright’s cause, spearheaded by Mrs. Hale, through her own ability to empathize with the pain, horror, and anger produced via suffering under patriarchy. Both Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale take very little time to put together the pieces of the murder because they are armed with something that the men lack, and something that their shared experience under patriarchy grants them: intimate insight into suffering, and a respectful and sensitive attendance to both Mrs. Wright’s life and her possessions. It is among these so-called "trifles" that all of the answers lay. The men could share in this knowledge if they weren’t so inured by their own sexist ideas and conditioning to regard women's lives, experiences, and minds as invalid.